Computers are fast enough that they never have to be the bottleneck
in a business process. When they turn out to be a bottleneck,
solutions always exist. However, the solutions do not always take the
form of answers to the question "How do I make this
query return the same rows faster?" So far, this
book has focused on answering that single question, and Chapter 9 described a few circumstances in which
satisfactory answers to that question do not exist. This chapter
takes the performance problem out of that self-imposed box and
considers how to solve the rare query runtime problems that cannot be
solved just by tuning a given statement.